Abstract

We describe several recent results on large network analysis with a special emphasis on community detection and on the analysis of mobile phone datasets. In particular, we describe the Louvain method that and can be routinely used for analyzing networks with billions of nodes or links. We analyze communities obtained on a social network constructed from mobile phone communications that span periods covering several months. We also describe applications of mobile phone dataset analysis for a range of applications such as urban planning, traffic optimization, monitoring of development policy, crisis management, and control of epidemics. With these applications in mind, we analyze the privacy threats of anonymized mobile phone dataset and show that human behavior puts fundamental natural constraints to the privacy of individuals.

Short Bio: Vincent D. Blondel is professor of applied mathematics and president of the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA ) where he was a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar. He has held various appointments, including at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden), at INRIA (Paris), and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Vincent has directed more than thirty PhD and postdocs. He is a IEEE and SIAM Fellow, and is the recipient of several international prizes, including the IEEE Ruberti prize and the SIAM prize on control and systems theory. He is a pioneer in the analysis of mobile phone datasets and the organizer of several international challenges on mobile phone datasets analysis. His recent work has been widely featured, including in Wired, Technology Review, Le Monde, La Recherche, BBC , CNN, Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.